Cobwebs and Cables Part 23

It is your mother who cannot give her consent, and she will do it some day."

"Does he know all?" cried Felix. "Is it possible he knows all, and will let me love Alice still? I think I could bear anything if that is true.

But, oh! how could I offer to her a name stained like mine?"

"Nay, the name was saved by his death," answered Phebe sadly. "There are only three who knew he was guilty--Mr. Clifford, and your mother, and I.

If he had lived he might have been brought to trial and sent to a convict prison; I suppose he would; but his death saved him and you.

Down in Riversborough yonder some few uncharitable people might tell you there was some suspicion about him, but most of them speak of him still as the kindest and the best man they ever knew. It Was covered up skilfully, Felix, and n.o.body knew the truth but we three."

"Alice is visiting my father's grave this very day," he said falteringly.

"Ah! how like that is to Canon Pascal!" answered Phebe; "he will not tell Alice; no, she will never know, nor Hilda. Why should they be told?

But he will stand there by the grave, sorrowing over the sin which drove your father into exile, and brought him to his sorrowful death.

And his heart will feel more tenderly than ever for you and your mother.

He will be devising some means for overcoming your mother's scruples and making you and Alice happy."

"I never ran be happy again," he exclaimed. "I never thought of such a sorrow as this."

"It was the sorrow that fell to Christ's lot," she answered; "the burden of other people's sins."

"Phebe," he said, "if I felt the misery of my fellow-man before, and I did feel it, how can I bear now to remember the horrible degradation of the man who told me of my father's sin? It was a drunkard----"

"John Nixey," she interrupted; "ay, but he caught at your father's sin as an excuse for his own. He was always a drinking man. No man is forced into sin. Nothing can harm them who are the followers of G.o.d. Don't lay on your father's shoulders more than his own wrong-doing. Sin spreads misery around it only when there is ground ready for the bad seed. Your father's sin opened my soul to deeper influences from G.o.d; I did not love him less because he had fallen, but I learned to trust G.o.d more, and walk more closely with Him. You, too, will be drawn nearer to G.o.d by this sorrow."

"Phebe," he said, "can I speak to Mr. Clifford about it? It would be impossible to speak to my mother."

"Quite impossible," she answered emphatically. "Yes, go down to Riversborough, and hear what Mr. Clifford can tell you. Your father repented of his sin bitterly, and paid a heavy price for it; but he was forgiven. If my poor old father could not withhold his forgiveness, would our heavenly Father fall short of it? You, too, must forgive him, my Felix."

CHAPTER VII.

AN OLD MAN'S PARDON.

To forgive his father--that was a strange inversion of the att.i.tude of Felix's mind in regard to his father's memory. He had been taught to think of him with reverence, and admiration, and deep filial love. As Felicita looked back on the long line of her distinguished ancestry with an exaltation of feeling which, if it was pride, was a legitimate pride, so had Felix looked back upon the line of good men from whom his own being had sprung. He had felt himself pledged to a Christian life by the eminently Christian lives of his forefathers.

Now, suddenly, with no warning, he was called upon to forgive his father for a crime which had made him amenable to the penal laws of his country; a mean, treacherous, cowardly crime. Like Judas, he had borne the bag, and his fellow-pilgrims had trusted him with their money; and, like Judas, he had been a thief. Felix could not understand how a Christian man could be tempted by money. To attempt to serve Mammon as well as G.o.d seemed utterly comtemptible and incredible to him.

His heart was very heavy as he rode slowly down the lanes and along the highway to Riversborough, which his father had so often traversed before him. When he had come this way in the freshness and stillness of the early morning there had been more hope in his soul than he had been aware of, that Phebe would be able to remove this load from him; but now he knew for a certainty that his father had left to him a heritage of dishonor. She had told him all the circ.u.mstances known to her, and he was going to learn more from Mr. Clifford.

He entered his old home with more bitterness of spirit than he had ever felt before in his young life. Here, of all places in the world, cl.u.s.tered memories of his father; memories which he had fondly cherished and graved as deeply as he could upon his mind. He could almost hear the joyous tones of his father's voice, and see the summer gladness of his face, as he remembered them. How was it possible that with such a hidden load of shame he could have been so happy.

Mr. Clifford, though a very old man, was still in full and clear possession of his faculties, and had not yet given up an occasional attention to the business of the bank. He was nearly eighty years of age, and his hair was white, and the cold, stern blue eyes were watery and sunken in their sockets. Some years ago, when Samuel Nixey had given up his last hope of winning Phebe, and had married a farmer's daughter, his mother, Mrs. Nixey, had come to the Old Bank as housekeeper to Mr.

Clifford, and looked well after his welfare. Felix found him sitting in the wainscoted parlor, a withered, bent, old man, seldom leaving the warm hearth, but keen in sight and memory, living over again in his solitude the many years that had pa.s.sed over him from his childhood until now. He welcomed Felix with delight, holding his hands, and looking earnestly into his face, with the half-childlike affection of old age.

"I've not seen you since you became a parson," he said, with a sigh; "ah, my lad, you ought to have come to me. You don't get half as much as my cashier, and not a tenth part of what I give my manager. But there!

that's your mother's fault, who would never let you touch business. She would never hear of you taking your father's place."

"How could she?" said Felix, indignantly. "Do you think my mother would let me come into the house my father had disgraced and almost ruined?"

"So you've plucked that bitter apple at last!" he answered, in a tone of regret. "I thought it was possible you might never have to taste it.

Felix, my boy, your mother paid every farthing of the money your father had, with interest and compound interest; even to me, who begged and entreated to bear the loss. Your mother is a n.o.ble woman."

A blessed ray of comfort shot across the gloom in Felix's heart, and lit up his dejected face with a momentary smile; and Mr. Clifford stretched out his thin old hand again, and clasped his feebly.

"Ah, my boy!" he said, "and your father was not a bad man. I know how you are sitting in judgment upon him, as young people do, who do not know what it is to be sorely tempted. I judged him, and my son before him, as harshly as man could do. Remember we judge hardest where we love the most; there's selfishness in it. Our children, our fathers, must be better than other folk's children and fathers. Don't begin to reckon up your father's sins before you are thirty, and don't pa.s.s sentence till you're fifty. Judges ought to be old men."

Felix sat down near to the old man, whose chair was in the oriel window, on which the sun was shining warmly. There below him lay the garden where he had played as a child, with the river flowing swiftly past it, and the boat-house in the corner, from which his father and he had so often started for a pleasant hour or two on the rapid current. But he could never think of his father again without sorrow and shame.

"Sin hurts us most as it comes nearest to us," said old Mr. Clifford; "the crime of a Frenchman does not make our blood boil as the crime of an Englishman; our neighbor's sin is not half as black as our kinsman's sin. But when we have to look it in the face in a son, in a father, then we see the exceeding sinfulness of it. Why, Felix, you knew that men defrauded one another; that even men professing G.o.dliness were sometimes dishonest."

"I knew it," he answered, "but I never felt it before."

"And I never felt it till I saw it in my son," continued the old man, sadly; "but there are other sins besides dishonesty, of a deeper dye, perhaps, in the sight of our Creator. If Roland Sefton had met with a more merciful man than I am he might have been saved."

For a minute or two his white head was bowed down, and his wrinkled eyelids were closed, whilst Felix sat beside him as sorrowful as himself.

"I could not be merciful," he burst out with a sudden fierceness in his face and tone, "I could not spare him, because I had not spared my own son. I had let one life go down into darkness, refusing to stretch out so much as a little finger in help, though he was as dear to me as my own life; and G.o.d required me yet again to see a life perish because of my hardness of heart. I think sometimes if Roland had come and cast himself on my mercy, I should have pardoned him; but again I think my heart was too hard then to know what mercy was. But those two, Felix, my son Robert, who died of starvation in the streets of Paris, and your father, who perished on a winter's night in Switzerland, they are my daily companions. They sit down beside me here, and by the fireside, and at my solitary meals; and they watch beside me in the night. They will never leave me till I see them again, and confess my sin to them."

"It was not you alone whom my father wronged," said Felix, "there were others besides you who might have prosecuted him."

"Yes, but they were ignorant, simple men," replied Mr. Clifford, "they need never have known of his crime. All their money could have been replaced without their knowledge; it was of me Roland was afraid. If the time could come over again--and I go over and over it in my own mind all in vain--I would act altogether differently. I would make him feel to the utmost the sin and peril of his course; but I would keep his secret.

Even Felicita should know nothing. It was partly my fault too. If I had fulfilled my duty, and looked after my affairs instead of dreaming my time away in Italy, your father, as the junior partner, could not have fallen into this snare. When a crime is committed the criminal is not the only one to be blamed. Consciously or unconsciously those about him have been helping by their own carelessness and indolence, by cowardice, by indifference to right and wrong. By a thousand subtle influences we help our brother to disobey G.o.d; and when he is found out we stand aloof and raise an outcry against him. G.o.d has made every one of us his brother's keeper."

"Then you too have forgiven him," said Felix, with a glowing sense of comfort in his heart.

"Forgiven him? ay!" he answered, "as he sits by me at the fireside, invisible to all but me, I say to him again and again in words inaudible to all but him:

'Even as I hope for pardon in that day, When the great Judge of heaven in scarlet sits, So be thou pardoned.'"

The tremulous, weak old voice paused, and the withered hands lay feebly on his knees as he looked out on the summer sky, seeing nothing of its brightness, for the thoughts and memories that were flocking to his brain. Felix's younger eyes caught every familiar object on which the sun was shining, and knitted them up for ever with the memory of that hour.

"G.o.d help me!" he cried, "I forgive my father too; but I have lost him.

I never knew the real man."

CHAPTER VIII.

THE GRAVE AT ENGELBERG.

On the same August morning when Felix was riding up the long lovely lanes to Phebe Marlowe's little farmstead, Canon Pascal and Alice were starting by the earliest boat which left Lucerne for Stansstad, in the dewy coolness of the dawn. The short transit was quickly over, and an omnibus carried them into Stans, where they left their knapsacks to be sent on after them during the day. The long pleasant walk of fourteen miles to Engelberg lay before them, to be taken leisurely, with many a rest in the deep cool shades of the woods, or under the shadow of some great rock. The only impediment with which Alice burdened herself was a little green slip of ivy, which Felix had gathered from the walls of her country home, and which she had carried in a little flower-pot filled with English soil, to plant on his father's grave. It had been a sacred, though somewhat troublesome charge to her, as they had travelled from place to place, and she had not permitted any one to take the care of it off her hands. This evening, with her own hands, she was going to plant it upon the foreign grave of Roland Sefton; which had been so long neglected, and unvisited by those whom he had left behind him. That Felicita should never have made a pilgrimage to this sacred spot was a wonder to her; but that she should so steadily resist the wish of Felix to visit his father's resting-place, filled Alice's heart with grave misgivings for her own future happiness.

But she was not troubling herself with any misgivings to-day, as they journeyed onward and upward through the rich meadows and thick forests leading to the Alpine valley which lay under the snowy dome of the t.i.tlis. Her father's enjoyment of the sweet solitude and changeful beauty of their pathway was too perfect for her to mar it by any mournful forebodings. He walked beside her under the arched aisles of the pine-woods bareheaded, singing s.n.a.t.c.hes of song as joyously as a school-boy, or waded off through marshy and miry places in quest of some rare plant which ought to be growing there, splashing back to her farther on in the winding road, scarcely less happy if he had not found it than if he had. How could she be troubled whilst her father was treading on enchanted ground?

But the last time they allowed themselves to sit down to rest before entering the village, Canon Pascal's face grew grave, and his manner toward his daughter became more tender and caressing than usual. The secret which Phebe had told him of Roland Sefton had been pondered over these many weeks in his heart. If it had concerned Felix only he would have felt himself grieved at this story of his father's sin, but he knew too well it concerned Alice as closely. This little ivy-slip, so carefully though silently guarded through all the journey, had been a daily reminder to him of his girl's love for her old playfellow and companion. Though she had not told him of its destiny he had guessed it, and now as she screened it from the too direct rays of the hot sun it spoke to her of Felix, and to him of his father's crime.